Your team is working hard. I mean, really really hard. They have been running discovery sessions with customers to see where the pain points are, and more importantly, ruling out potential products that would be a waste of time and resources. They are meeting with stakeholders privately to make sure they feel heard and that expectations are aligned before the quarterly roadmapping discussion. They are working through requirements with engineering and design to create releases with polish and flair. They are reshuffling priorities and workloads when a new opportunity comes up that no one can afford to miss. They are documenting new onboarding materials for the upcoming release so customer support is prepared to jump in to assist on day one.
One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do.
— Victor Hugo
And as the team lead, you are working on leveling up a junior team member, making sure that the inter-personal friction which popped up last week is addressed, automating a standard procedure to reduce mundane workload on the team, helping with the day-to-day problems that always seem to pop up at the last minute, stepping in to finalize some product requirements while someone takes a well-earned vacation, protecting the team from noise so they can focus, sorting through endless requests and questions on Slack, and let's not forget the meetings. All the meetings!
It's exhausting just thinking about it. And then you're blindsided when someone on another team, or even worse in leadership, says carelessly, "I don't even know what you do all day!" What?!? I eventually got tired of watching this happen, so I built something to fix it. More on that later. First, let's talk about the problem.
What do you mean by 'invisible work'?
A large percentage of what product managers do every day is difficult to quantify and explain to anyone not there. PMs are the driving force that keeps engineering moving forward, sales in the loop, business goals on track, and customer support from losing their sanity, all while making sure that users are actually getting the features and products they need.
Here is just a small taste of the activities that product teams do that rarely make headlines:
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Competitive research that shapes decisions, even though the write-up never gets read by anyone else
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Synthesizing scattered feedback into a coherent pattern
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Saying no to nine ideas so the tenth one gets done well
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Talking a sales team out of a one-off feature request without damaging the relationship
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Translating an exec's vague idea into something engineering can actually build
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Untangling conflicting requirements and deadlines before anyone notices there was a conflict
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Reprioritizing quietly when something breaks, without making a big announcement about the shuffle
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Mentoring someone through a tough moment, so the team gets stronger without anyone else noticing it happened
The cost of being invisible
Most other business teams have concrete numbers to signal progress, such as lines of code submitted, tickets resolved, clients renewed, and new sales. But when you don't have a way to easily quantify your contributions, you can end up with a number of problems often brewing behind the scenes.
Loss of trust: When coworkers and leadership don't understand what goes into your decision making, they are less likely to be open to accepting your expertise and knowledge when it comes to priorities and choices. In fact, the loss of trust can go so far that leadership starts to question whether they need a product function at all. (Hint: They do.)
Loss of budget: If executives don't know what you do, they aren't going to fund the new hire you want to make or give your team raises. Worse, you can find yourself losing team members to layoffs for "cost savings".
Loss of morale: The disrespect and exclusion that comes from the loss of trust will quickly contribute to a team that is frustrated and unmotivated. Add in frozen salaries and overwork from a team that's too small, and you'll quickly find that productivity and creativity have taken a nose dive.
Surfacing the work
So, how do you make the invisible work seen? Make it a priority to tell everyone what your team is doing. Make sure there is a summary at the top so busy coworkers and executives can get the highlights in 60 seconds or less. And then dive down into as much or as little detail as you like.
Figure out your target audience. Do you want to make sure that your boss has a more clear idea of what's happening inside your team? Do you want to give coworkers more insight into thought processes on what is making it onto the roadmap? Does leadership need to understand the product management function better overall?
Determine the best cadence. Daily updates are likely way too much information, but is weekly the right rhythm? Maybe every couple of weeks? I recommend against going for a month or worse, an entire quarter, without updates. At that scope, the level of detail so important will be lost.
Identify your delivery method. Emails are easy to set up, but maintaining the correct email list can be difficult. An internal wiki or blog is often a great location, but might take a little more effort to set up if they don't already exist. Adding the details as notes in pre-existing weekly meetings can be tempting, but it's easy for your updates to get lost amidst the noise.
Get a procedure to follow. Once you commit to a schedule, make sure you deliver on-time or you may lose some of that hard-earned trust you're building up. This is a great place for an AI assistant to reduce the workload on you. I recommend downloading The Surface Report, a free tool I built that gives you a repeatable format ready to share with your team. Available as an AI-powered tool you copy into Claude or ChatGPT, or as a Word template you fill in yourself. You can find both versions on the Resources page.
Why did I create The Surface Report? Because I learned this lesson the hard way. I was doing all the right things. I was regularly meeting with my boss for status updates. I held multiple meetings every month with teams across the business unit to keep everyone up-to-date. We were so busy all the time that I never realized that I was missing a critical opportunity across the company. That invisibility cost me and my team; headcount decisions were made without anyone at the table understanding what we did.
Status meetings told my boss what happened in the room. They didn't leave a trail anyone else could find when it mattered. The key was to build a record consistently and intentionally to raise awareness and knowledge. Now I always make sure that I'm surfacing the key details to the right people on a consistent schedule, so my team gets seen.